Stalker

I thought I’d never take up pen again. But how to relieve my mind? There are others out there like me but it’s not like anyone has thought to start up a support group… for stalkers. John White’s the name, stalking’s the game. When I sing it off like that I think…but if only it were something you could really sing off. God, how I wish I could sing it off. The singing stalker.
It had taken me ten years and indescribable mental anguish before I finally somehow managed to pick up that phone. I think a criminal, I mean a real criminal, would have found it easier to walk into a police station, wait his turn in line behind the passport renewal and lost dogs queries and, when his turn came, blurt out, “Hi, I murdered my wife.” Yeah, your standard serial killer would have found it easier to spill it all to the police than this social deviant found it to pick up the receiver and dial a shrink. The social stigma. The shame. Being exposed like that. Better to, easier to keep it all under cover. And I did, as long as I could. But when you feel the noose tightening around your neck, boy!

“Hi, I’d like to make an appointment with Counselor Lesley Greene. You see, I look normal, I present as normal, but my true natural compulsions, if truth be told, could largely be classed as socially unacceptable. Illegal! Immoral! Funny, for years I suffered from crippling guilt, because of my “condition”, but the real torment, if I were to try to pinpoint it for you, if I were to try to be truly honest with you, the real torment was simply that, deviant stalker that I was, am, am, am, deviant stalker that I am, I don’t feel in the slightest bit deviant. In my defense I would go so far as to say, I don’t have a deviant bone in my body. It is you who say it .”

God, forgive me. Something like that was what I envisaged blurting out on the phone. How many times, how many times I ran these words over in my head? How many times I cut that number out of the paper. How many times I copied it, glued it, into my diary. God! When I think of it!
The stress inside me that day. It had been building up for hours before I even lifted the receiver at 9:00am. My heart knocked, God, and I thought I would faint. I waited, listening to the phone ring at the other end of the line.
“Hello, Counselor Lesley Greene speaking. How may I help you?”
“I’d like to make an appointment to see a counselor.”
“I see. Is it for yourself or someone else?”
“Myself.”
“And what’s the name?”
How could I say my name? How could I just blurt it out forever? I must have hesitated because he jumped in:
“This is completely confidential.”
“John Brown.”
John Brown. Not my real name but how could I put it out there forever.
When was a good time, he wanted to know. What an easy question. I felt a weight lift from me. I had envisaged having to confess everything on the phone, all my gory details, to a horrified Lesley Green, before being sentenced to an entirely different counselor, one for the tough nuts, the hard core deviants and not Lesley Greene for the pretty people with the pretty problems. God, forgive me.
Counseling. Lesley Greene. Here I was. Ten years it had taken to get to this point in time. I still remember baldy, fat guy, Lesley, with the woman’s voice, sitting there that first day. No desk. He was in an arm chair. I was on a soft couch. Deep pink. Maybe he thought I’d like to lie down. I sat uptight on the edge. There was a box of tissues on the coffee table right in front of me. How did he know I’d sit on this end of the couch? There was a warm sweet smell. What was it? I felt like I’d walked into a place for whole people, a place where perfect people come and talk about a glitch in their perfect lives. “I had an argument with my wife and now we’re not talking.” “I’m married but I’m having an affair.” “I want a divorce.” Such are the indulged in troubles of other mortals. God, I was sweating now. How was I going to drop a stalking bombshell on this guy, this guy who looked like he might think problems were something you perused in a college textbook, for counselor want-to-bes?
“In your own time” he said to me. It was just three words that I had to say. I could say them and be exposed forever, or I could not say them. I could feel the tension mounting upwards in my body again. He was waiting, but not for long because somehow, in one croak, it came blurting out.
“I’m a stalker.”
Silence. His expression, a rehearsed mixture of understanding and encouragement seemed like it would remain fixed, but then it fell away, awkwardly. Like melting butter might slide off hot toast, it dripped from his face. Resounding silence. Then his shoes squeak. It suddenly occurs to me that he might be beginning to experience stress, maybe a milder version of what I had been experiencing all morning. Uncharted waters for Lesley. I waited. I kept my eye fixed on him. I wanted to take him all in. He was still struggling for an appropriate facial expression. I could tell something somewhere had short-circuited in him. I should have eased him in. I should have started with my childhood. That’s what shrinks are comfortable with, talking about childhood. My God, he’d a real weirdo on his hands, here between the marriage break-ups, the mid-life crises and the clinically depressed. Here was a real whopper. Nothing had prepared him. He continued to struggle desperately for an appropriate facial expression. Finally, someone had to say something. I’d said my three words. I felt the pressure was off me. The silence dragged. Then, he got it together. “Ok.” Pause. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” His eyes shifted then. But I began. I told him about it. He stared and stared. He looked stupefied but I just kept on talking. It was so hard to start. I didn’t want to ever have to start again, so I kept going. I talked and talked. I told him the stalking itself seemed to come naturally, even from an early age and was now second nature. If I remembered back, you could almost have described it as a kind of hobby. I knew it was considered deviant behavior but for me it was simply an interest. It gave me something to think about, I told him. With stalking there was always something to do, somewhere to go, something to plan. I almost wanted to describe it as “therapeutic” but I checked myself. I never sat in, I told him. I’d find myself very busy before and after work and at lunchtime. In a nutshell that was all fine before I married. My wife had always prepared a packed lunch for me. She thought we were saving money. If she knew the overtime I’d turned down to spend the evening sitting in my car or standing on a street corner, buying items I didn’t need just to authenticate my presence somewhere. (I used to throw them away afterwards but as it got costly I started to return them.) If my poor wife only knew! Did she know? The anxiety this question caused to flood through my arteries! I told Lesley all this.
Lesley! Lesley! It rolled from my tongue. It was like I’d been waiting all my life to tell you the whole story. After about twenty minutes of an uninterrupted flow of words I suddenly realized that I no longer felt the stress. My God, I was enjoying myself. I realized I’d leaned back on the couch. With every word, I could feel a healing come over me. My God, counseling really works. I suddenly wanted to laugh I wanted to burst out laughing. But then my eye caught sight of the box of tissues and I held back. But I was on a roll. Lesley’s head moved neither to left nor right but his rapid blinking was all the green light I needed now. “Don’t get me wrong Lesley”, I told him, “I was so good at my craft I’d never even once aroused suspicion.” Ha. I watched for a reaction. In all the time I’d been talking he hadn’t moved, not a muscle, nothing, except for the blinking. He was blinking like the devil. The problem for me, I said, was not the stalking. It was just, well the lies had obviously been mounting up. They take their toll. My wife wondered why I worked such long hours and earned so little. “All the overtime you do!” she’d cry, exasperated. All this weighed on my conscience. Since I’d married I never saw my poor mother any more. I’d only time for work then, well, out all day and finally, home. Sometimes I wouldn’t even go home. The “all-nighter’s at the office” didn’t wash with my wife. She would not be placated. The noose was tightening. I sighed. Silence. More blinking from Lesley. I went on. One night when I came home I knew something was different. I had entered in good spirits but immediately inside a slow quiet panic came creeping over me. It was quite late. I thought she’d be in bed but all the lights were still on. I was expecting an argument, a row, some shouting, hysteria, the usual pantomime. Normally, I face the music or the stony silence upstairs first and then blog or facebook for a time to restore inner calm. This time I headed for my office. There she was. What was she doing? How long had she been in here? She didn’t lift her eyes from her tea. “Where were you, Jackie? Work?”
“Work.”
“Work! Who’s John White? Tell me! No hurry. We’ve been married ten years. I don’t mind giving you just a little more of my time.”
At this point I looked over at Lesley. Lesley, Lesley, don’t just sit there blinking. Say something baldy! Why didn’t he say something?


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